Economic Truth Research Articles

Совершенствование механизма реализации полномочий по администрированию доходов лесного хозяйства России

Russia’s forest resources are the country’s natural wealth, which is also in demand beyond its borders. Forest resources are one of the stable sources of revenue for budgets at all levels. At the same time, the realities of modern economic truth and natural and man-made factors constantly make adjustments to the cost and volume parameters and to the very base of potential revenues. The existing mechanism for implementing the powers of administration of forestry revenues does not respond quickly enough to changing circumstances; it is scattered across the regions and poorly integrated into the modern digital system. This requires the development and implementation of new management tools, methods, and approaches, including those implemented as part of public policy, aimed at ensuring the integrated use of forest resources and increasing the level of trust of forest users in the state authorities. The article groups the main problems of applying the revenue accounting mechanism in the industry, proposes options for their solution and directions for improvement, notes the importance of information support for revenue administration, solving problems on automation of procedures for administration of payments from forest use based on the consolidation of efforts of the scientific community and direct implementers represented by public authorities.

The evolution of finance as an economic category

The article considers the history of the development of “finance” as an economic category – from the emergence of its primary forms in the Ancient World to our time. The development of the finance category is closely linked to the economic development of society and the stages of the formation of economic teachings. The contribution of each economic era and some economists to the content of finance is analyzed. In this process, the peculiarities of the contribution of Russian history as a whole and, among other things, the period of the planned economy are emphasized. The article emphasizes a simple economic truth – money must be able to collect and money must be able to spend – the state has the right to collect taxes in the budget as its economic basis, but it also has the obligation to its population to spend the collected funds for its own benefit.

The 2023 Veblen-Commons Award Recipient: Jon D. Wisman: Thorstein Veblen, the Meaning of Work, and its Humanization

Thorstein Veblen gave special attention to work. He claimed that an instinct of workmanship “is present in all men, and asserts itself even under very adverse circumstances … [It] is the court of final appeal in any question of economic truth or adequacy.” Although many scholars have examined Veblen’s claim, this article differs by examining his conception of work in light of findings from anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and happiness research. The questions explored are: Why and how did Veblen understand work as instinctual and did his understanding conform to Charles Darwin’s concept of instincts? Is it an instinct that evolved to be pleasurable or to gain respect and status to motivate provisioning? If evidence supports the claim that work did indeed evolve to be pleasurable, and today much of it is not, then its restructuring should be a top social priority. Although Veblen’s understanding of work provides inadequate guidance as to how it should be restructured, he was pathbreaking in insisting that our understanding of this question, and of human behavior and society more generally, must be grounded in the evolutionary biology launched by Darwin. Accordingly, a second aim of this article is to offer support for Veblen’s attempt to do so.

Internal vs. external explanations: A new perspective on the history of economic thought

The present paper is devoted to showing, via a reductio as absurdum argument, that all externalist explanations for truth in economics are false, but that if any are used, it should not be the democratic one utilized by Rosen (1997). Rather, even though it is equally fallacious, it should the one proposed in the present paper: the last publication in a debate indicates the substantive winner.
 Key words: truth, economics, majority rule, democracy, debate, argument.
 JEL classification: B0, B1, B2, B4.

For Postcapitalist Studies: Inheriting Futures of Space and Economy

The worldwide social and ecological unravelling of the 21st century presents an unprecedented challenge for thinking and practising liveable economies. As life support systems are annihilated in view of the sustainable accumulation of capital, social and economic alternatives are rapidly emerging to shelter possibilities for life amidst the ruins. Postcapitalism has gained increasing attention as an invitation to amplify existing alternatives to systemic scale. The transformations required are the focus of social movements, political projects and academic research that demand the theorisation and organisation of alternatives to capitalist realism today. What has often received less attention is how such emancipatory alternatives are burdened with problematic legacies living on within, in the epistemic heritage enabling and organising societal transformation. The ‘post-’ prefix, and the break from capitalism that it announces, has largely been treated as a given. This study resists such temptations of the affirmative in order to ask how restrictive and counterproductive burdens are carried along in emancipatory thought and practice, and how their continuous negotiation might have to redefine postcapitalism itself. Taking the ‘post-’ seriously demands critical and theoretical skills capable of examining the complexity of our inherited troubles.
 This thesis offers a theoretical contribution to this juncture by bringing together the feminist economic geography of JK Gibson-Graham and the deconstructive philosophical practice of Jacques Derrida. Gibson-Graham’s framework of diverse economies has become a major contribution to thinking and practising postcapitalist politics. It offers a popular affirmative and experimental approach to collective life, one that discards the givenness of economic truths and power in favour of a heterogeneous landscape of interdependent agency. Here, however, the attention is on Gibson-Graham’s early, theoretical examination and critique of capitalocentrism: the omission, forgetting and subjugation of existing more-than-capitalist economies. This notion underlines the necessity to unlearn capitalist homogeneity in order for a plural, prismatic economy of coexistence to come to view: the worst forms of exploitation coexisting with the best of emancipations, both demanding situated negotiation and collective action. Capitalocentrism functions as a conceptual ground of the diverse economies framework, yet its theoretical, empirical and political complexity has largely been left unexamined. While the concept of capitalocentrism works to motivate its alternatives, its use simultaneously exhibits an unproblematised belief in overcoming the problem of postcapitalist burdens.
 To think capitalocentrism as a continuous, unownable task, rather than a solid stepping stone for emancipation, it is theorised here as an inheritance with the help of Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida’s ‘rigorously parasitic’ approach towards constitutive givens and his negotiation of troubling legacies offer a distinct approach to received problematics. Here, his writings on heritage, archives and violence are examined as situated practices of reinterpretative work with/in various legacies. This allows a distinct conceptual and methodological approach to inheritances that pivots on a vigilance of (self-)critique and a practice of close, complicit reading. The inheritedness of our textual materiality, with its historical promises and perils all too closely intertwined, becomes the issue. It allows a persistent negotiation of and oscillation between determinate, situated problematics and the incalculable and unlocatable. As an inheritance, capitalocentrism becomes a heterogeneous and unownable legacy that both enables and haunts the thinking of postcapitalist space and economy.
 Developing such a conceptual and methodological approach to postcapitalist problems, this thesis studies capitalocentric inheritances in four main chapters. First, the concept of capitalocentrism and its critical role in Gibson-Graham’s framework is treated in light of deconstruction’s promises. Second, Derrida’s economies of violence are studied to conceptualise capitalocentrism as a problem of history. Third, popular and academic debates concerning postcapitalism are explored as negotiations of capitalocentric inheritances. Fourth, the capitalocentrism of language itself becomes the issue as a problematic negotiated in sites and theories of translation. Altogether, this study proposes an attention to postcapitalist economic geographies that supplements emancipatory approaches with a critical-deconstructive attention to their limitations. Amidst immediate demands for social and economic transformation, it underlines what mediates those demands: the troubled language, the complicit sensorium that we inherit. By offering fresh grounds for rethinking the inherited futures of space and economy, it submits a challenge to claims that purport to govern and overcome the postcapitalist problem of constitutive burdens. As an inheritance, capitalocentrism necessitates drastic renegotiations of postcapitalist givens. This task is here called, tentatively, postcapitalist studies.
 Keywords capitalocentrism, deconstruction, diverse economies, inheritance, Jacques Derrida, JK Gibson-Graham, postcapitalist studies

The Model Of Becoming Aware: disabled subjectivities, policy enactment and new exclusions in higher education

ABSTRACT This paper aims to present an analytical tool called Model of Becoming Aware, to explore the production of the subjectivities of disabled students and new forms of exclusions during the enactment of disability policies in the Italian higher education context. It deploys Foucault’s governmentality studies to frame the changing historical conditions from a welfarist to neoliberal governance, of the university and it draws upon qualitative data collected in an Italian university. The Model is the product of situational analysis of the enactment of inclusive policies and explores the mobilisation of authority, resources, practices, subjects, opportunities and knowledge by two technologies of power – autonomy and sensitivity. Findings illustrate how medical and economic truths in times of austerity are producing new forms of performative neoliberal subjectivities in higher education while subordinating forms of subjection based on expensive welfarist provisions. Through the Model of Becoming Aware, the article aims to supply a contingent tool to analyse current ableist and exclusionary practices in the enactment of disability higher education policies, providing an evidence-based space to rethink policies to support disabled students educational access and attainment in higher education.

Abstraction and closure: a methodological discussion of distribution-led growth

ABSTRACT This paper presents a methodological discussion of two recent ‘endogeneity critiques’ of the Kaleckian model and the concept of distribution-led growth. From a neo-Keynesian perspective, it is criticized because it treats distribution as quasi-exogenous, while in Skott (2017. Weaknesses of ‘wage-Led growth.’ Review of Keynesian Economics, 5(3), 336–359), distribution is viewed as endogenously determined by a series of (exogenous) institutional factors and social norms, and therefore one should focus on these instead of the functional distribution of income per se. The paper discusses how abstraction is used in science and economics, and uses the criteria proposed by Lawson (1989. ion, tendencies and stylised facts: A realist approach to economic analysis. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 13(1), 59–78) and Mäki (1992. On the method of isolation in economics. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 26, 19–54; 1994. Isolation, idealization and truth in economics. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 38, 147–168) for what constitutes an appropriate abstraction. Based on this discussion, it concludes that the criticisms are weak, although some of the issues raised by Skott provide some interesting directions for future work within the Kaleckian framework.

Joan Robinson Was the First Bastard Keynesian: There Is No ‘Perhaps’

Joan Robinson Was the First Bastard Keynesian: There Is No ‘Perhaps’

From the ‘planning euphoria’ to the ‘bitter economic truth’: the transmission of economic ideas into German labour market policies in the 1960s and 2000s

ABSTRACT This paper compares interconnections between dominant economic thought and processes of policy-making in the area of labor market reforms in Germany in the late 1960s and the early 2000s. The transition in labor market policies in this period could be described as a change from an active to an activating approach. At the level of economic discourse these policy changes correspond to a paradigm shift from Keynesian to neoclassical/neoliberal economic thought. We investigated these changes by focusing on two distinct reforms of labor market policies and carried out a critical discourse analysis of the relevant public and academic discourse of economists. We find that the paradigm shift in economic thought was accompanied by a shift in economists’ discourses on labor market policy issues. Against this backdrop we conclude that economic terms, concepts and theories associated with the transformation from the ‘Keynesian planning euphoria’ to the ‘neoliberal bitter economic truth’ had a significant impact on LMP reforms in Germany. By focusing not primarily on the concrete practices associated with the different approaches of LMP, but on the more abstract ‘politico-economic rationalities’ behind those practices our paper contributes to the analysis and critique of these reforms and their social implications.

Canada–Indonesia relations, past and present

Canada–Indonesia relations recently passed their 65th anniversary, but they still have a tentative air about them. Despite regular talk about developing a strong Canadian relationship with a country that potentially has much in common with Canada, Canada–Indonesia relations have mostly been friendly but shallow. An overview of the history of bilateral relations, from the opening of a Canadian mission in 1953 to recent bilateral deals committing Ottawa and Jakarta to various forms of collaboration, reveals that rhetoric about common interests has some substance, but a new announcement amidst good intentions every few years is not likely to lead to any deep partnership. There are, however, foundations for closer ties in civil society, including in the fields of economic development, truth and reconciliation, religious deradicalization, and Indigenous peoples linkages.

Challenges in Giving the Voice to Billions of Peoples: The Case of Facebook

It is known that the economic viability of every social platform is built on a simple formula: Attract users and hold their attention as long as possible so personal information can be collected that will fuel targeted adverts. This is achieved through the look and feel formula. This move can be viewed in any projects initiated by Facebook. In response, countries around the world are developing policies to deal with the pressure coming from these social media companies. The consequence is that, if a policy reduces dwell time, it will keep the company from attaining its never-ending goal of increasing quarterly profits. In fact, nearly every Facebook problem can somehow be connected to this simple economic truth. Dwell time increases through provocative posts and adverts over dull ones. Dwell time will be enhanced through cunning psychological manipulators who make the viewers addicted, over authentic and well-researched news stories. This article aims to develop some challenges faced by the company Facebook in giving the voice to billions, and what has been the company strategy to deal with all these challenges.

Models, Truth, and Analytic Inference in Economics

A popular view of models among economists and philosophers alike is that all models are false, but some are useful. Models are frequently treated as convenient fictions, idealizations, stories about credible worlds, or “near enough” to the truth. But such a understandings pose serious questions, among them: if models are false, how is it that they are so useful? how can they have any bearing on what is actually the case in the world? how can we evaluate them empirically? How can we develop them for greater precision? for understanding how models related to the world, how they can successfully support scientific investigation? The paper argues that these and related questions reflect a fundamental confusion: models are, in fact, useful only to the degree that they are instruments for stating truth. The confusion arises from a failure to understand how models relate to the world analogically. Analogies are fundamentally incomplete and perspectival, so that the truths that state are necessarily piecemeal But models may nonetheless be apt. A critical distinction is drawn between accuracy and precision in modeling. Modeling is related to Charles Peirce’s analytical inference. And the application of analytical inference in economics is illustrated with a historical case-study of Lawrence Klein’s early econometric models of the U.S. economy.

Economics and the Shop Floor: Reflections of an Octogenarian

In 2000, the Post-Autistic Economics Newsletter began covering the resistance of French students against the “uncontrolled use of mathematics” in their discipline. The students spoke of a “need to liberate economics from its autistic obsession with formal models that have no obvious empirical reference.” (Post-Autistic Economics Newsletter, issue 3, 27 Nov 2000) In an earlier newsletter they had elaborated, too often the lectures leave no place for reflection. Out of all the approaches to economic questions that exist, generally only one is presented to us. This approach is supposed to explain everything by means of a purely axiomatic process, as if this were THE economic truth. We do not accept this dogmatism. We want a pluralism of approaches, adapted to the complexity of the objects and to the uncertainty surrounding most of the big questions in economics (unemployment, inequalities, the place of financial markets, the advantages and disadvantages of free-trade, globalization, economic development, etc.) (Post-Autistic Economics Newsletter, issue 2, 3 Oct 2000). The students did not object to economics being a science; they just wanted to make it empirically relevant. This search for an empirically relevant science of economics has been a hard slog, for if the effort to show the autistic nature of orthodox nomothetic neoclassical economics has been relatively easy, the search for a praxis relevant alternative has not. I suggest that in looking for empirical relevancy primarily through expansion into the social sciences, post-autistic economists have been looking in the wrong place. For empirical relevance they need to focus on the relationship between economics and the shop floor.

Economic and Social Rights and Truth Commissions

Economic and Social Rights and Truth Commissions

Inference of Economic Truth from Financial Statements for Detecting Earnings Management: Inventory Costing Methods from an Information Economics Perspective

We introduce uncertainty in the classic inventory costing choice problem to investigate the underlying partitions imposed by two accounting inquiries (processes of generating information): variable costing (VC) and absorption costing (AC). In a contemporaneous reporting environment, we show that absorption costing provides a finer partition of the state space compared to variable costing when a firm arbitrarily increases the production level (opportunistic overproduction) and the predetermined fixed overhead rate is adjusted. Grounded in an information economics perspective, the intent of the article is to propose an approach to detect real earnings management by extracting information from financial statements. The resulting managerial biases arising from earnings management are also discussed.

Inference of economic truth from financial statements for detecting earnings management: inventory costing methods from an information economics perspective

We introduce uncertainty in the classic inventory costing choice problem to investigate the underlying partitions imposed by two accounting inquiries (processes of generating information): variable costing and absorption costing. In a contemporaneous reporting environment, we show that absorption costing provides a finer partition of the state space compared to variable costing when a firm arbitrarily increases the production level (opportunistic overproduction), and the predetermined fixed overhead rate is adjusted. Grounded in an information economics perspective, the intent of the article is to propose an approach to detect real earnings management by extracting information from financial statements. The resulting managerial biases arising from earnings management are also discussed.

Truth Commissions after Economic Crises: Political Learning or Blame Game?

This article addresses an important but understudied aspect of the recent Great Recession in Europe: the institutional strategies political elites deployed to learn from past policy failures and address accountability, more specifically, truth commissions. We raise two overlapping puzzles. The first concerns the timing of the decision to adopt an economic truth commission: while Iceland established a truth commission at an early stage of the crisis, Greece and Ireland did so much later. What accounts for ‘early’ versus ‘delayed’ truth seekers? The second concerns variations in learning outcomes. Iceland’s commission paved the way for learning institutional lessons, but truth commissions in Greece and Ireland became overtly politicised. What accounts for these divergences? This article compares truth commissions in Iceland, Greece and Ireland and identifies two types of political learning – institutional and instrumental – related to the establishment of a truth commission. It argues that political elites in countries with higher pre-crisis levels of trust in institutions and public transparency are more likely to establish economic truth commissions quickly; this is the ‘institutional logic’ of learning. The ‘instrumental logic’ of learning, in contrast, leads governments interested in apportioning blame to their predecessors to establish commissions at a later date, usually proximal to critical elections.

The order of forest owners' discourses: Hegemonic and marginalised truths about the forest and forest ownership

Our understanding of the world is essentially based on shared meanings that are intersubjectively produced and reproduced in different social practices. In this study we analyse private forest owners’ discourses of the forest as a social practice that produces alternative competing truths about the forest and forest ownership. We examine the order of five predefined discourses (1–5) in relation to discoursal power by analysing the signs of hegemony and marginalisation within these discourses. Importantly, we also analyse the position of different kinds of forest owners within the prevailing order of discourses. Our critical discourse analysis combines qualitative content analysis with quantitative multivariate analysis (NMS) and is based on in-depth interviews with 24 Finnish forest owners.The harmonious discourses of the forester (1) and the economist (2) demonstrated many hegemonic features. This essentially illustrates the hegemony of the economic truth about the forest and its proper use among forest owners, as economically effective wood production was emphasised in both of these discourses. The signs of marginalization were common in the discourses of the distant economist (3), the critical anti-economist (4), and the dutiful forest owner (5). Discourse 4 was characterised by an open critique of the hegemonic economic truth. Forest owners with primarily non-monetary objectives were placed in an unfavourable position in the order of the discourses.The results reflect a wider discursive environment where economic meanings and practices prevail as the most natural and proper ways of thinking and acting. Being a forest owner is easy in Finnish society if the hegemonic economic truth about the forest functions as a natural and unproblematic part of one's forest ownership. However, discourses 4 and 5 indicate that the prevailing discursive conditions make forest ownership unfulfilling for some owners. Openness to alternative ways to understand the forest and forest ownership should thus be enhanced in research, policy, practical forestry, and the media.

Blue-Collar Classroom

This article examines how a labor studies program, most of whose students come from unions in the building trades, wrestles with a deeply rooted perception about the relationship between an individual’s skill and her wages. Aspects of tradition and experience in the unionized building trades validate it, and public discourse today sees it as a basic economic truth. Other aspects of building trades’ tradition and experience, as well as current mobilizations by low-wage service workers, show that collective power determines wages and enables a conversation about the social wage that decouples individual skill from wage levels.

Economic top–down evaluation of the costs of energy storages—A simple economic truth in two equations

Energy storage is a key technology for increasing energy efficiency and a more extensive integration of renewable energies. Besides technical and physical limits, cost uncertainty is a major barrier to the development and utilization of energy storage systems. In this work, an economic top–down approach has been worked out following the assumption that the maximum acceptable costs of energy supplied by a storage should not exceed the cost of energy from the market. Thereby, maximum acceptable storage capacity costs are calculated from the interest rate assigned to the capital costs, the intended payback period of the user class (e.g., industry or building), the costs of energy from the market, and the annual number of storage cycles. The main findings of the top–down evaluation are: first, for a fixed cycle period, the maximum acceptable storage capacity costs depend on the user’s economic environment. Second, seasonal thermal energy storage with up to 2 cycles per year requires storage costs below 3€·kWhcap−1 in the building sector and below 0.4€·kWhcap−1 in the industry sector, respectively. Third, short-term storages with for example 300 cycles per year allow 300 times higher storage costs. Therefore, if the annual number of storage cycles is sufficiently high, several energy storage technologies are economically viable. In this case, systems should be compared with regard to technical or physical attributes.